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Despite promises, 157,000 Kenyans still in camps

NAIVASHA (Kenya): As Kenya’s politicians toured the country’s battle-scarred west, walking among the uprooted multitudes, their message was clear: you will be able to go home soon. We, your leaders, will help you.

But in the hardest-hit areas, there is no clear path home. More than four months after a disputed presidential election unleashed weeks of ethnically tinged bloodshed, some 157,000 people are still living in camps. The challenge facing Kenya’s government is immense, even after a historic power-sharing agreement stopped much of the killing.

“We have decided as a government that people should go back where they were evicted from,” President Mwai Kibaki said on Saturday as he toured a camp in Naivasha, the final stop on a three-day “peace tour” with Prime Minister Raila Odinga. “We want a Kenya of peace,” Mr. Odinga added, “where everyone can live where they want.”

Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga — once bitter enemies, now reluctant partners — promised a swift resolution to the displacements during stops in towns including Eldoret, Molo, and Naivasha. The region experienced some of the worst bloodshed in the weeks after the disputed presidential election on December 27, 2007; more than 1,200 people died and 300,000 were displaced.

But for many Kenyans, the leaders’ promises were empty. Some had their land taken over by neighbours in the days after they fled their homes, so they have no homes to return to. Others say ethnic hatreds are still boiling, making it too dangerous even to attempt to go home. “If we go home now we will be killed,” said Christine Ndinba, 43, a member of the Kikuyu ethnic group who lives with her four children at the Naivasha Stadium camp with 3,000 other people.

Person Harun Mwangi, 52, said he will never return to Eldoret, where he watched as his two children were among dozens burned alive in a church where they were taking shelter. It was one of the most brutal moments of Kenya’s crisis. “It is better that I become a beggar in Nairobi than to go back to my farm and see the people who killed my children,” he said earlier this week at the sprawling Eldoret show ground, where 16,000 Kenyans are still living. “This is no way to live,” Mr. Kibaki said as he crouched to peek into a tent at the Eldoret camp.

The election, which Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga both claimed to have won, laid bare frustrations over poverty, corruption and long-standing ethnic rivalries in Kenya. Kikuyus, the tribe Kibaki belongs to, are perceived to dominate others, including the Luo, Mr. Odinga’s ethnic group.

In many regions, the violence brought a bloody end to decades of coexistence among Kenya’s ethnic groups, transforming cities and towns where Kenyans had lived together — however uneasily at times — since independence from Britain in 1963.

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